Teacher Discussion Forums

"Crop top" is by far what I hear the most.

I've heard French babyboomers say "Les Stones Rolling" more often myself.

Food for thought here: Through my Masters, I had to research the effects of French in Morocco, Spain, Italy and Vietnam. This also included studying the phonetic and syntaxic problems associated with teaching French in these 4 countries. What I found in these texts was that because Arabic (both Clas...

An article in the Ottawa Citizen (with the above title) states that an online list of 'parlance' is making a list of phrases made popular by the hit show the Simpsons. It was not put together by lexicographers, but by fans of the show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made-up_words_in_The_Simpsons Did y...

I personally think that one of Juan's points is a key point that illustrates my opinion as well: "Allowing odd though not wrong expressions from students is not lowering standards." We might not have a language dictator who's responsible for accepting/rejecting new phrases, but I'd guess (from other...

Well, in my opinion, social and societal differ in their application (and precise definition): social seems to be used for both individuals and society as a whole, wheras societal seems to be used for the latter. You wouldn't often hear "He had societal problems growing up". The educate vs educative...

On my first search in an online dictionary I found that the word "lessening" had an entry and gave contexts including an example with "prices" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lessening). I would side with Larry, personally. Subjective arguments like "255 online uses don't make it good English" dep...

Sorry Meta, you were right. My bad.

Just so everybody knows, I was helping Sally identify what she had in mind. I really don't know what the phenomenon is called that Juan mentioned. Juan's example demonstrates exactly what la liaison does in French. But Meta's example isn't quite right because the 't' in 'est' is followed by a conson...

Hey Sally,

In French it's called "la liaison", in case you were wondering. My French-English dictionary says its the same in English.

That sure was indeed a hypercorrection SJ : I'm wrong because I wasn't talking about oral French? :) I may have only mentioned written French but it's hardly "wrong" because of that. The precise example I gave represents a difficulty (albeit, in written French only, if you have to hear it SJ) that b...

Seeing as the example I gave was written, SJ, the context for everything I said about native speakers was regarding the written French (I'd say native writers, but there really is no such thing) And I can say with absolute certainty that the writing example of redundancy I gave is indeed a problem f...

Stop me if I'm not following this discussion and I'm going in the wrong direction, and I realize I'm more information than necessary here :) When discussing language, I find identifying redundancy is a necessary topic (that comes up repeatedly) because we constantly want to understand why our langua...

Just an observation: Some people treat days of the week as personal pronouns. Just as you wouldn't say " The Tara B is correct" , I find many native speakers wouldn't say "the last Thursday" when meaning "the previous Thursday". And although I'm probably wrong, Hey's theory regarding "last" with no ...

Just to clarify what it is your researching: Do you mean your doing research on the represntation of slang used by characters in movies? If so, I wouldn't think you'd find anything that specific because the language used by these people is supposed to represent reality (and there are many books on s...